Explain shell

Explain shell is something that has helped me a lot, but the situation of needing it left me baffled for so long... Why can&#x27;t I search by command + flag? For example, I know what command A does, but I&#x27;m not sure what flag C means. I can search for man A, but why can&#x27;t I search man A --flag C to get only the relevan portion of the manpage?<p>This has baffled me for years. I&#x27;d have guessed that discoverability and documentation would be a core functionality and focus of open source developers.<p>Also, if I find a command which flag is not explained by explain shell, is there some source I can create PR to? Some DB, where I could propose the addition..?

Reminds me of:<p>- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;KillMath&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;KillMath&#x2F;</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;regexr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;regexr.com&#x2F;</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simple.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_mathematical_symbols" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simple.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_mathematical_symbo...</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rpi.edu&#x2F;dept&#x2F;math&#x2F;ms_graduate&#x2F;resources&#x2F;SayingMath.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rpi.edu&#x2F;dept&#x2F;math&#x2F;ms_graduate&#x2F;resources&#x2F;SayingMath.p...</a>

Explains Hell

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6834791" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6834791</a>

Welp, I still don&#x27;t know what :(){ :|:&amp; };: exactly does, but it sure borked my WSL. Error: 0x80070040 after forking too many processes.<p>I know comment moderation sucks, but it would be great to have some kind of wiki&#x2F;comment system&#x2F;human generated notes on popular commands.

Inspired by this site, I made a handy shell script[0] for use from cli - good enough to lookup documentation for options from man&#x2F;help pages. Doesn&#x27;t cover all the features offered by explainshell, there are issues with some corner cases and tested only on Ubuntu<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;learnbyexample&#x2F;command_help" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;learnbyexample&#x2F;command_help</a>

What I like most about this kind of posts. Is that users will share other alternatives and gems. Not disspointed

This is great, but the man page for pipes is probably not helpful to the kinds of people who benefit from this tool.

Can’t view the page on iPhone 6 and safari. Doesn’t let you zoom out to see the whole page at once.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;explainshell.com&#x2F;explain?cmd=rsync+--progress+-avr+-e+%27ssh+-p47999%27+" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;explainshell.com&#x2F;explain?cmd=rsync+--progress+-avr+-...</a><p>This is really well done, what a neat resource.

This is convenient but I still stand by the statement I made here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16085604" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16085604</a>

I love this so much. Its perfect tool for developers, i don&#x27;t know how i didn&#x27;t encounter this sooner, it exists for more then 5 years.

There&#x27;s also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shellcheck.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shellcheck.net&#x2F;</a>

A command line version would be great.

The only thing one should gather from these threads is that mos people on this site are completely incapable of using the shell and are too lazy to learn it.

Why is the first example a fork bomb?!?

Nicely done